Ben McGrath

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker, as a fact checker, in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003. He has contributed more than two hundred stories to The Talk of the Town, and his feature subjects have included the Tea Party movement, a Mafia trial, and various dispatches from the world of sports: Formula 1 and Iditarod racing, the N.F.L.’s concussion crisis, and Kobe Bryant’s contemplation of retirement. He is at work on his first book, about an unheralded modern explorer who paddled a plastic canoe past his house, on the Hudson River, and then disappeared, in 2014.

In the state’s most closely fought congressional race, local good will and a coarsening national dialogue are in open conflict.

November 3, 2018

Last week, as the attorneys’ closing statements wrapped up in federal court, the N.B.A. introduced a special class of contract for élite eighteen-year-olds to earn as much as a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars playing a year of minor-league basketball instead of attending college.

Lee Jenkins’s job with the Los Angeles Clippers can be described as reportorial scouting, or, as Jenkins puts it, focussing “on the ‘who,’ instead of on the ‘what.’ ”

September 22, 2018

David Meggyesy, who played as a linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals in the sixties, was accused of disrespecting the national anthem in a sport with a culture that has long celebrated authoritarian deference.

The talk show “On the Clock,” airing on Conservative Review Television, is described as returning to a time “before everybody decided sports was boring and everything was racist.”

August 18, 2018

As a baseball player, Dykstra had a singular talent for putting failure out of mind and plowing forward with untrammelled confidence. As he plots his next comeback, that same trait seems to extend to his daily life.